Comment on Chromium vs Brave

ReversedCookie@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• qwert230839265026494@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Bounce tracking

  TIL.

  Fingerprinting

  Gosh, I can’t believe I forgot about Brave’s excellent implementation of fingerprint-spoofing.

  Also Brave announced on X/Twitter that they will continue supporting MV2, Chromium won’t.

  This is a big thing. Thank you for mentioning that!

  if you rly don’t like Brave

  I’ve actually for the longest time used Brave as my go-to Chromium-based browser, but it seems as if the support on Linux leaves a lot to be desired. I don’t understand for example why it just isn’t included in the repos of Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu etc. Sure; the AUR has it -also available as a not up to date nixpkg-, but the others have to either download the .deb or rpm package (which is undesirable due to inability to keep it updated at all times) OR rely on Brave’s own repos, that somehow borks itself every once in a while. Which actually just happened a couple of days ago on my device*. I’m on Fedora Silverblue, so it was already quite hacky to get Brave from its own repos. But due to the repos borking themselves, I didn’t get any automatic system updates at all for the last couple of days. I only noticed it yesterday when I did my weekly manual update. Perhaps I should setup something that notifies me when the automatic system update fails, but I’ll prefer if the repos I rely on don’t call it quits whenever they feel like it. Apologies for my rant*.

  Vivaldi would be a good alternative, but is weaker than Brave, since it includes not all the protections or alternatives which Brave has.

  Would you say that Vivaldi is (at least) better than Chromium for security and privacy?

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  • ReversedCookie@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Would you say that Vivaldi is (at least) better than Chromium for security and privacy?

    Yes, definitly. For example they removed completly the privacy sandbox stuff from the chromium code and also includes some additional privacy protections.

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    • qwert230839265026494@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Aight, I’ll look into it. Much appreciated!

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      • ReversedCookie@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        You’re welcome

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      • clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I’m very happy with Vivaldi as a long time Opera main. (I followed the devs over from Opera) I’m not smart enough to talk about the privacy benefits, though.

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  • t0m5k1@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I use arch-btw so I get arch from aur, on other Linux distros the way to get brave is via flatpak if the provided repos are borked for you.

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    • qwert230839265026494@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      on other Linux distros the way to get brave is via flatpak if the provided repos are borked for you.

      I would love to use the flatpak if it was endorsed. Privacy Guides says the following about it:

      “We advise against using the Flatpak version of Brave, as it replaces Chromium’s sandbox with Flatpak’s, which is less effective. Additionally, the package is not maintained by Brave Software, Inc.”

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      • t0m5k1@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Yes, I could say come to arch but you seem happy in fedora 😉

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  • Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Aur is just repackaging the official Debian package, that’s a very straightforward process. Most distro repositories don’t work that way, they build the binaries themselves. Some interested party would need to put in the work.

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    • qwert230839265026494@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Most distro repositories don’t work that way, they build the binaries themselves.

      Interesting. Is this a matter of trust?

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  • chenxiaolong@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t understand for example why it just isn’t included in the repos of Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu etc.

    For the most part, these distros all require that packages are built from source vs. repackaging prebuilt binaries. While Brave is open source, if you compile it yourself, you’ll be missing tons of API keys for accessing Brave’s services: github.com/brave/…/Build-configuration. While I suspect most folks wouldn’t care if eg. the cryptocurrency things stopped working, other things that break include Brave Sync and the downloading of the adblocker filter lists.

    Brave currently does not provide a way for 3rd parties to generate API keys to access these services: community.brave.com/t/…/457833. Outside of reverse engineering their prebuilt binaries to extract the API keys, you’re pretty much out of luck (if you care about these features working).

    For websites that only work in Chromium, I’ve switched to just using plain old Chromium from Fedora’s repos. Being able to build the browser from source without losing features is pretty important to me (eg. I rebuild Fedora’s Chromium with the patches for enabling hardware video decoding on Wayland).

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